Nuance on the Left

This presidential election has not lacked for clowns, and in a circus Barack Obama fits right in. But as the Black clown, Obama’s foot-in-mouth moments mostly involve insulting the Black community. This could be to establish his independence from the community in order to earn his bona fides with the moderate electorate or a way of appeasing the white liberals he’s courting. Or it could be that his foot and his mouth are magnetized. Whatever the reason, as a Black person, the Obamanator experience has been as distasteful as rancid, spoiled, stinky, curdled milk.

This was written, not about Barack Obama, but about Herman Cain. Touré at Time Magazine let loose with this torrent of sophomoric angst in his October 21st article. His screed is just one more example of a group that isn't interested in civility, but rather tearing down their opponent at all costs. And they usually do it by attacking the person, not policy.

The left is particularly adept at lacking self-awareness. Their ability to self-reflect is almost non-existent. In the third paragraph of his Cain chew-out - after having called Cain a Black clown, the Herminator, Cain't and the Black Sarah Palin - Mr. Touré asks, "Now we’re doing teenage-level disses?" [Insert long Jon Stewart-esque pause for effect.]

Maybe Mr. Touré doesn't read his own work. The evidence may be that he squeezed in some more teenage name calling before he reached the end of the article: Hermy, Big Daddy Cain, Cain is a clown, buffoon and another Hermanator round out his 690 words of "serious intellect, realistic solutions and admirable character," three charicteristics Mr. Touré said that Herman Cain did not posses.

As if the name calling wasn't enough to convince the reader of Mr. Touré's superior intellectual argument, he marginalizes and dismisses everything that he disagrees with. It is not that Cain has different ideas about the economy, it is that he is courting and appeasing the white conservatives. It is not that Cain has a different opinion than Mr. Touré, it is that his foot and his mouth are magnetized. It is not that Mr. Touré and Cain don't see eye to eye, it is that Cain is as distasteful as rancid, spoiled, stinky, curdled milk.

So when you get past all the name calling and invective, what is left? Essentially Mr. Touré makes three points. 1) He doesn't think blacks have been brainwashed. 2) Obama has been a part of the black experience. 3) Racism is alive and well.

Mr. Touré doesn't like that Cain said that some blacks were brainwashed. He noted that:

Brainwashing is a highly offensive charge that suggests the Black mind is defective or has gone to sleep. In a world where Black intelligence is constantly maligned and denigrated and underestimated, this cuts deeper than the quick. Alleging that we’re not intelligent enough to make rational political decisions would hurt if it weren’t so comical coming from his mouth.

Does Mr. Touré also feel the pain in his quick for poor white people who are often maligned as hillbillies, white trash and rednecks? Let's change the focus of his comments from blacks to the NASCAR crowd and see how it sounds:

Brainwashing is a highly offensive charge that suggests the white mind is defective or has gone to sleep. In a world where southern white intelligence is constantly maligned and denigrated and underestimated, this cuts deeper than the quick. Alleging that NASCAR lovers are not intelligent enough to make rational political decisions would hurt if it weren’t so comical coming from his mouth.

Brainwashing does not suggest that the mind is defective. Everyone is susceptible to a brainwash. I suspect that if a certain cultural or religious group of whites voted in lock step at rates at or above 90 percent for Republicans, Mr. Touré might not bristle so vociferously at the notion of a brainwash.

Mr. Touré then asks, "... has the GOP offered a reasonable alternative?" to the brainwash. Um, yes. The subject of your article Mr. Touré. And the other 6 or 7 people showing up to the Republican debates. The whole point of Cain making the brainwash reference was to jar the black community into considering ideas from him or anyone else from the Republican side of the aisle.

Moving on to Mr. Touré's second objection, he feels that Obama certainly was and is partaking of the "black experience" in America. Well, not exactly. He notes that you can't define black experience too narrowly. And that even if "Obama has lived a life that’s different than most Black people’s", Obama is black. So therefore what he experiences is the black experience. And anyway, Obama is redefining the experience. Where he is, the experience is. "The mountain came to Muhammad." Of course, no mention that Herman Cain's experiences are the black experience or that they may be redefining the black experience in any way.

Number three. With this objection Mr. Touré drifts perilously close to a Jesse Jackson sing-a-long. In citing his own book, Mr. Touré notes that even his extensive research that consisted of asking "about 100 people" to identify the "the most racist thing that’s ever happened to you," he discovered that more than one third couldn't identify such an act. So rather than conclude, as Herman Cain has, that things are improving in America, Mr. Touré provides the answers for this mysterious racism lacuna: these people just weren't aware of the hidden, subtle, unknowable racism that is modern racism. Maybe they were brainwashed. And no level of success within the black community - not his, not Obama's, not Herman Cain's - is going to refute that racism is everywhere.

Oh, and Touré doesn't like Cain's sense of humor. But Cain's a clown. An unfunny clown. So there.